Sublime

The Attachment Connection: Parenting a Secure and Confident Child Using the Science of Attachment Theory (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2008),

can see the point of all the attention I give to Toby now; it’s to make him feel good, not just now but in the future. Toni and I are filling him up with love and, hopefully, that will mean he has love to give when he’s older, so he will feel valuable. I have no relationship with my own father. I know Toby is getting from me what I didn’t get from

Similarly, New Zealand researcher Alec Roy found that humans with the short allele had higher rates of depression than those with the long version but that this was true only if they also had a childhood history of abuse or neglect. The conclusion is clear: Children who are fortunate enough to have an attuned and attentive parent are not going to d

Parenting is a journey that tends to begin with a high level of egoic narcissism, an energy we take into our relationship with our child. The consequence is that we can easily, though in many cases inadvertently, fall into the trap of using our children to fill some need in ourselves, all the while under the illusion that we are loving, giving of o

in a society with a focus on competition, capital and accumulation, optimizing children fits right into neoliberal economics. There is an unnecessary, insidious cruelty to the societal construction of motherhood. An “invisible violence,” as Adrienne Rich puts it.

Despite the prevailing powerful social condemnations of bed-sharing, nearly half of Western parents bed-share at least some of the night in the baby’s first 3 months.